The magistrate said "Merry", the defendant said "Mary"

[Paul Johnston]

There are a few British accents which have the full Mary/merry/marry
merger, but not many--some types of Glaswegian might, since marry
(and carry, cf. the ubiquitous "kerry-oot" from the pub or chip shop)
has /E/, making marry=merry, and a specifically Glaswegian (&
Ulster) /er/:/Er/ merger under /E/, bringing Mary into the same set.
You probably get the merger in Ulster Scots too, and this might be a
good place to look for any "inherited" merger in American English.
I'm not sure if any Southern Appalachian dialects have the full
merger, but Upstate NY does (and transmitted it westward), and there
was a bunch of Scotch-Irish settlers there who are often overlooked
as sources for Inland Northern forms.

Cultivated British English in Revolutionary times was definitely
rhotic (shown in Sheridan and Walker), though not all vernaculars
were.  Besides the North of England (read central and western
Yorkshire and surrounding areas to the north and south;
Northumberland and Cumberland were probably rhotic), East Anglia
might have been non-rhotic by 1750, and maybe Cockney too.  So
Bostonians (where East Anglians settled) might have been non-rhotic
too, and maybe New Yorkers (Cockneys); not sure if anyone in the
South was, although I--anachronistically--think of Washington as a
Tidewater speaker, and therefore non-rhotic.  Probably totally wrong.

I remember seeing a movie, set in NY City in the Revolutionary War,
where an effort was made to get the characters to sound 18th century,
resulting in the local New York characters sounding like a strange
cross between Newfoundland and Brooklyn.  It sounded plausible to me,
though who knows how far off the mark it was.   Any American
pronunciation guides from the late 18th c. I've seen come from New
England (Fisher, Webster), and the models sound like old-fashioned
New England, as far as I can see, like the type of dialect James
Russell Lowell's Bigelow Papers poems represented in the 19c, if less
broad.

Didn't Franklin write a grammar and pronunciation guide, where he
agrees nearly exactly with his British contemporaries?

Paul Johnston


> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: The magistrate said "Merry", the defendant said
> "Mary"
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------
>
> At 5:57 PM -0700 6/9/10, David Wake wrote:
>> Sheridan, writing in 1762, said that R-dropping was found only in
>> northern English provincial speech.  It doesn't seem to have become
>> firmly established in the prestige accent of England until the
>> beginning of the nineteenth century, and I would imagine that it was
>> not imported into US Northeastern and Southern prestige accents until
>> still later.
>>
>> David
>
> OK, good to know.  So it's actually more the British accents (like
> that of King George) that are off rather than the New England ones.
> I wonder if there mightn't have been other salient differences
> between the dialects of Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston at the
> time of the Revolution, though.  I was under the impression that the
> differences in (what would turn into) U.S. regional accents were
> already distinguished by 1800, based on different settlement patterns
> of those regions.
>
> LH
>
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 5:31 PM, Laurence Horn
>> <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>>>  ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>> -----------------------
>>>  Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>>  Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>>>  Subject:      Re: The magistrate said "Merry", the defendant
>>> said "Mary"
>>>
>>> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> -----------
>>>
>>>  At 6:13 PM -0500 6/9/10, Dan Goodman wrote:
>>>> David Wake wrote:
>>>>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>>>> -----------------------
>>>>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>>>> Poster:       David Wake <dwake at STANFORDALUMNI.ORG>
>>>>> Subject:      Re: The magistrate said "Merry", the defendant
>>>>> said "Mary"
>>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>> -------------
>>>>>
>>>>> Many Brits assume that "Maryland" is pronounced as though it
>>>>> were two
>>>>> words  "Mary Land", with successive SQUARE, happY and TRAP vowels
>>>>> (with the last syllable having secondary stress).  Since Brits
>>>>> havecx
>>>>> split Mary/marry/merry, this sounds very different from the actual
>>>>> pronunciation to be heard from Maryland natives.
>>>>>
>>>> Did Brits (and Americans who pronounce two or all of these
>>>> differently)
>>>> split the sound, or did people who pronounce them all the same
>>>> merge them?
>>>>
>>>  Reminds me: I've been watching the video series of "John Adams"
>>>  originally from HBO (based on McCullough's biography) and while
>>> I've
>>>  been enjoying it, I've also been bothered by the apparent working
>>>  assumption that all the Americans, from Massachusetts to
>>> Pennsylvania
>>>  to Georgia spoke "American", quite distinct in their pronunciation
>>>  from the British.  I'd have thought they might have tried a bit
>>>  harder to represent New Englanders as speaking a bit more like the
>>>  British, or at least like 20th century New Englanders (well,
>>>  actually, Laura Linney as Abigail Adams isn't too far off in that
>>>  respect), the southerners like, well, southerners, and only the
>>>  Pennsylvanians (and neighbors) speaking rhotically.  Is my guess
>>>  about what Americans would have sounded like in the 1770s-1790s
>>> that
>>>  far off?  Would Washington and Jefferson really have sounded pretty
>>>  much like Adams, and ditto Hamilton?  Maybe they just thought it
>>> was
>>>  easier both for the actors and for the viewers who were supposed to
>>>  tell the good (American) guys from the bad Brits.
>>>
>>>  LH
>>>
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>>>
>>
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